General Motors 2016

General Motors Summer 2016 Internship

During my internship at General Motors, I had the opportunity to work as both a developer and designer. I was fortunate enough to work on many separate projects throughout the course of the summer: redesigning the internal pattern library for the Global Connected Consumer Experience team, developing the prototype of the new General Motors Owner Center website, designing and developing preliminary sketches for the dashboard interface of the 2017 Bolt EV, and creating my own project from scratch including research, concept creation, and design components of a Dealership Application.

Disclaimer: Due to a signing of an NDA, I am only allowed to disclose a limited amount of information about my projects

Redesign and Development of the GM Owner Center Website

The first project I worked on was developing a prototype of the new GM Owner Center Website. GM currently is focusing on rebranding their products, and the new Owner Center website was created to maintain consistency with the myBrand application. As part of the development team, I worked with designers and product managers to develop the prototypes of the new site using HTML5, CSS, SASS, and JavaScript. Frameworks we used also included node.js, handlebars.js, and gulp.js.

Please contact me directly if you would like to see the fully functional website prototype, or the comp.

Design of Preliminary Sketches for the Apple CarPlay Dashboard Interface for the 2017 Bolt EV

As a member of the UX team, I was also able to work on the initial design of the new Bolt EV dashboard interface for Apple CarPlay specific to electric vehicles. As part of the team, I attended meetings and brainstorming sessions on icons, sketches, and preliminary screen designs. I also created preliminary icons for the plan and score screens.

GM Chevrolet Dealership Application

The last two weeks of my internship, my manager gave me an individual project to utilize the entire design process, and create from the beginning a fully functioning dealership application. I went through the entire process of brainstorming, analysis, concept creation, and prototyping.

To see the full development process of my project, see the link below:

https://ziqichen.myportfolio.com/dealership-application

UX Testing and Re-Design of GCCX Internal Pattern Library

The Global Connected Consumer Experience team at General Motors is a team responsible for General Motor's Infotainment System software consisting of UX Designers, Developers, Creative Team, Marketing and Research, and Product managers. In order to facilitate communication between teams, we needed a new internal pattern library to maintain consistency in style guides and communication between departments.

I was responsible for the initial design and construction of the Information Architecture of this website. Initially, I created an open card sort with the necessary components for all the departments through OptimalSort. This was given to a random number of people in each department and categories for a closed card sort was determined after analyzing the results. Afterwards, I created a closed card sort and gave out the survey again to a random number of people in each department. I then constructed a preliminary Information Architecture for the website, and used OptimalSort to conduct a tree test. Currently, the pattern library is under development with an optimized version of the Information Architecture from the tree test results.